


Constructing the Aftermath

by nnozomi



Category: Dreamships
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 15:56:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5462426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has their own way of fixing what was broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constructing the Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flamebyrd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flamebyrd/gifts).



> The book uses ** to indicate the use of sign language; Word is fussy about this, so I have substituted ## instead.

“Heh, Chaandi. Good to see you again.”

“It’s been a while,” Chaandi acknowledged, nodding to let the man across from her know he could take the empty seat.

“Thanks.” Jon Bethel sat down with his usual loose-jointed awkwardness and slapped at the tabletop menu to order a glass of beer. “How you been? I heard you were mixed up in all that AI mess.”

“Oh, well…I’m getting by.” _And if gossip about all that is what you want, you can look elsewhere._ “What are you working on now?” she asked, a surefire way of distracting any mangamaker. “You just wrapped up that space-opera series, right? I’ve heard a lot of good things.”

She knew Bethel mostly from the mangamakers’ unofficial union, where they were on opposite sides of most issues. He was yanqui, with typical, almost stereotypical, yanqui politics—he’d been a Dreampeace supporter, until Manfred. A lot of people had been Dreampeacers until Manfred.

Bethel took his beer from the girl waiting tables, handing her a money chip from his overall pocket. “Thanks, sunshine…” to the waitress. “Yeh, that was a lot of fun to work on,” he went on, turning back to Chaandi. “I decided I wasn’t going to worry about getting anything actually right, too much research, too much money, so you know what? All the FTL pilots, the tug pilots, you name it, they watch it so they can laugh at all the things I got wrong. They love it!”

Chaandi grinned. Bethel’s work reflected his politics, and she didn’t like much of anything he did, except for the visuals. He had a wonderful eye for color, design, cinematography, visual timing…it was a pleasure to watch his mangas, as long as she took off her ear first. “Sounds like you can’t lose,” she said, drinking off the rest of her juice.

“Yeh, the thing is…speaking of…” He leaned forward. “You have that friend who’s the FTL pilot, right? The one the AI tried to kill?”

“None of your business, Bethel.”

“Oh come on, Chaandi, don’t be like that. I’m not trying to pry. I just wondered if you could get me an introduction to her.”

“ _What_?”

“Well, you asked me what I was working on now, didn’t you? I’m thinking of making something about the AI thing, you know, not exactly based on what really happened—I mean, who knows what really happened anyway, with Kagami and Dreampeace and the FPG and the Constructors’ League all saying different things? The only people that really know about it are the Mitexis, and they’re both dead—“ he didn’t see Chaandi’s reflexive wince—“and those pilots. So if you could just get her to talk to me—“

“Come on, Bethel! Talk about not trying to pry!” Chaandi stood up. “Forget it.”

“Elvis Christ, Chaandi, you know I’m not that kind of a gossip. For the space-opera series, like I said, the more things I screwed up the more they ate it up, but for something like this—everyone’s still pretty much on edge, right? I want to do right by it.”

“And you don’t think it’s maybe a little too soon?” But she had sat down again, recognizing the seriousness in Bethel’s tone.

“Sure it is, but that’s when it matters. Wait any longer and nobody will care any more.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Unless you’ve got something cooking yourself? Don’t want to share your inside information?”

“ _No_.”

“Well then. Look. Just an introduction, yeh? If the pilot, what’s her name—“  
“Jian,” Chaandi filled in automatically, in spite of herself. “Reverdy Jian.”

“Jian, right. If she tells me I can go to hell, that’s that, right? But give her a chance to say it herself.”

Chaandi sighed, looking into the melting ice at the bottom of her glass, tinted faintly pink with the dregs of the juice. Bethel had more of a point than he knew, she thought. Jian would almost certainly say that it wasn’t Chaandi’s business to be screening her calls.

And given the circumstances of their parting, it wasn’t as if Chaandi owed her any favors.

“What’s your mailcode again?” she said finally. “I’ll ask her to give you a call, but that’s it. If she cuts you off, don’t come back to me.”

Bethel grinned, clinked his half-full glass into her empty one. “Thanks, Chaandi. You won’t regret it.”

 

She put it off for two days, busy with her day job, with union business, with the last of her own mangas—edits finished some time before and most of the bills, improbably, somehow settled, but she still had to deal with the usual distribution hitches—until, finally, it had to be done and she put Jian’s mailcode reluctantly into the system. Only, of course, to get “isn’t-available-right-now” from the automated response.

Chaandi swore one-handed, half relieved and half disappointed; before she could think too hard about it, she tried the pilots’ cooperative instead.

“Yes, Bi’ Chaandi?” The keyast-secretary was back on the job, with her usual impeccable courtesy. “I’m sorry, Bi’ Jian is off planet at this time.”

Right. That happened with pilots. “May I leave a message for her, then? Ask her to call me—Suleima Chaandi, when she’s back. She has the mailcode.”

“Of course, Bi’ Chaandi.” The woman’s long fingers moved rapidly over her console. “Would you like me to mark it urgent?”

“No, that isn’t necessary. Thank you,” Chaandi added, and punched off. The keyast-secretaries made her nervous, with their unplaceable status and their unshakeable underworld courtesies. She’d rather deal with some coolie kid working part-time to pay off lycee fees, who would just say “Haya, bi’, I’ll pass that on.”

She really must have been rattled. It hadn’t even occurred to her just to leave Bethel’s mailcode for Jian, though that would have been easy enough—instead she’d managed to set it up so that she and Jian would have to talk directly. Habit? Her unconscious tricking her into something? Or just not thinking it through?  

 

“Off-line,” Jian said, and stepped out of the pilot’s cage with a sigh of relief that she didn’t bother to conceal.

Vaughn, already slipping into his virtual world, rolled his eyes at her but—for once—didn’t comment. Across the chamber at the engineer’s console—in the cramped functional sections of this lumbering passenger ship, engineering itself was a space designed for machines only, and you didn’t go there unless you had something to fix—Red didn’t even look up.

There was a lift tube, but it was faster to take the ladder up through the crawlspace, and Jian emerged in crew quarters rumpled and wishing they’d build more ships for people with her build. She’d ceded the chief pilot’s cabin to Vaughn and Red, simply because there was no way two people could simultaneously occupy any of the other cabins; right now her only complaint about the confined space was that she couldn’t sprawl across the bed without kicking the storage units.

She woke six hours later to her suit’s timed alarm, dressed—the drab workcloth trousers and wrap-on shirt that were good enough for a run like this—and went out to rummage for breakfast. Vaughn was at the table in the communal space, devouring a plate of sandwiches while his construct minded the store. “Morning,” he said.

“Evening,” in return. “No problems?”

“Around here? Even flatter than the way out. Fucking boring. They could do this whole run with the constructs alone.”

“Don’t say that too loud at home, Imre,” Jian said mildly, beginning on her sausage roll and coffee—the ship didn’t stock the eggy rice and tea she would have preferred.

“It’s not as if all of Landage doesn’t know where we stand on the issue,” Vaughn said with his mouth full, swallowed vigorously, and went on more clearly, “No kidding, I don’t think there’s been a deviation factor higher than 0.4 the whole way out and back. Even your playground model should be handling it fine.”

“Shut up, Imre,” Jian said automatically. “The KR’s good enough.”

“You used Elisee for years without flinching, I don’t know why you don’t let Kagami give you one of their top-of-the-lines since they’re panting to—“ Vaughn looked up as Red came into the room, his thick hair darkened to auburn with water. “The KR’s no fun for the engineer either, right, bach? All the fine compensation it’s not up to, Red has to handle manually.”

Red shrugged, not meeting her eyes. He punched something into the autoserver and waited, half turned away from both of them, while it cycled.

“He’s up to it,” Jian said. “And it’s not like any of us are overworked—who was just complaining about how boring this run is?”

“Yeh, well, what happens on the next one? Seriously, Reverdy. What happens when we run into real trouble? No denying Peace will go ahead and assign us the difficult runs, because he knows we’re the best. At least, he knows Red and I are, and that you damn well were before Manfred.”

“Nice to know you think I’m no better than my construct, Imre.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it fucking well, Reverdy. You’ve still got it, but the KR and the constructs like it you’ve been using, that’s one step up from a training simulator. It doesn’t _matter_ how good a pilot you are, you can’t make the construct function above its level. I’m not saying we’re going to run into another situation like the trip back from Refuge—“

“You better not be, sunshine,” Jian interjected, and saw Red flick a glance in her direction that might have been amusement.

“Point is, it doesn’t have to be that bad to be bad. How about that Hermes run for SawaCo? If you’d been using the KR then, we wouldn’t even be here now. Or the cargo of crystals bound for Isis, remember, trading off shifts for a solid forty hours straight to keep the ship dead smooth? With a construct that low-functioning, we’d have fucked up the cargo but good and still be paying off the liability—if the whole cooperative wasn’t driven into bankruptcy.”

“Imre—“ Jian flattened her hands on the table, staring down at her own fingers to get over the urge to hit her partner. “Let me spell it out for you, okay? I do not want something like Manfred in my head—or my ship—ever again. Haya, I _know_ Kagami’s constructs are not AI, not even pseudo-AI, but you know? The smoother they work, the _less_ comfortable I feel with them. The KR-880 is a clunker, you’re absolutely right, and that makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to get along with it.” She realized she was signing as she spoke, emphasizing the words, a habit she thought she’d dropped after her stepfather’s death. “I know it’s not the best option. But what do you want me to do?”

Vaughn stretched with hands behind his head, sighing. “Look, Reverdy, it’s not like I can’t see your point, either.” He didn’t seem to notice the verb he’d chosen, but Red’s expression shifted fractionally behind the half-mask of flaming hair. “I worked with Manfred too, remember. I don’t have the same—look, you want to know—I still get twitchy wondering if the system’s going to just shut down on me like it did then.” Jian remembered his silhouette in the pilot’s cage, surrounded by the shreds of his virtual world. “I don’t like piloting on edge that way, but I’ll be _damned_ if I’ll let some fucking machine stop me doing my job. I talked to Red about it, right, bach? Once you know what might happen, it makes a difference having a technician on your side.”

“Reverdy’s too,” Red murmured, uninflected.

Vaughn made an impatient gesture. “Well, sure. She knows that, right, Reverdy? But if that’s still not enough, what I’m _trying_ to say is, I think you should go talk to Willet Lyardin.”

“About Manfred?” Lyardin had still, or again, been in the news by the time Jian had her new eyes; there had been reports that she was leaving Kagami to set up as an independent contractor, with a couple of old colleagues. The newsdogs had speculated thoroughly on whether Kagami had fired her for what she’d done with Manfred, or she’d quit before they could do any such thing, or some of both. “Bet she got a hell of a severance package out of them, either way,” Vaughn had said cynically.

“She was in touch with me a couple times, afterwards,” he said now. “Wanted to hear how you and Red were doing. I’ve got the mailcode for her new office.” He grinned wryly. “She’s back in the midworld, at least for work—commuting up from Estoile Aurore, sooner her than me. Give her a try, Reverdy. If anyone can rig up a construct you can trust, she can. And she owes you and me.”

 

Chaandi was working when the signal lights flashed on the connection board. She put down the light pen and punched on, only a little jolted to see Jian at the other end, a nondescript meeting room at the pilot coop visible behind her.

#Hello, Chaandi.# Jian chose to greet her in sign. #You called while I was away?#

#Haya.# Her hands felt stiff and awkward, which was ridiculous—it wasn’t as if she and Jian hadn’t fought and made it up and fought again any number of times, since their first meeting slinging insults at each other outside Jian’s stepfather’s old club. _Then again, it’s not like she’d ever put my life in danger until that last time_ , Chaandi reminded herself, and signed with an unwonted crispness. #I have a message for you from Jon Bethel--# fingerspelling the name when Jian frowned at the unfamiliar namesign. #You know who he is? He’s a manga-maker, made _Honor in Freefall_?#

Without her ear on she couldn’t tell, but she thought Jian snorted. #I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.#

#He’s not, but we’ve done some work together for the union. He wants you to call him, anyway. I’ll flip you his codes.#

Jian hesitated. #What’s up?#

Chaandi sighed, and went over Bethel’s request briefly, wondering why she didn’t just say _call him and find out_. She watched Jian’s mouth tighten.

#He’s got to be kidding.#

#That’s the first thing I said too,# Chaandi agreed. #I didn’t promise him you’d do anything, obviously. Even call him.#

#But you said you’d talk to me for him?# _You didn’t turn him down flat_ , was the implication.

#Haya, I guess I did. I think you could do worse, Reverdy. Obviously it depends on what he wants to know,but…#

#You said he was Dreampeace?#

#Was,# Chaandi repeated, emphasizing the past-tense gesture. #I don’t think he knows what to think about it any more, that’s why he’s trying out this idea.#

#Well, I’m through with…# Something crossed Jian’s face that Chaandi couldn’t read; she shook her head and frowned. #And look, if he thinks I’m going to be on his side just because I look yanqui--#

#I think most people got rid of that idea after what you did with Manfred,# Chaandi said, wrists flat with irony. #Look, Reverdy, it’s up to you. I just think it’s better to have more of the truth out there for people to see, you know?#

#So why not do it yourself?# Jian shot back.

Caught by surprise, Chaandi’s hands settled to the table in front of her.

#I mean, maybe you’re working on something else right now,# Jian added more cautiously, seeing Chaandi finger the light pen on the table.

#Hah. I wish.# She shrugged, picked up one of the sheets of quickprint on the table and held it up to the pickup for a moment, showing Jian the drawing: not a conte for a new manga, just sketches of body art for her day job. #I’ve been kind of…You remember I designed some of the posters for the anti-Dreampeace rallies?#

#How could I forget,# Jian said wryly.

#Haya. I guess. Well, I’ve sat down a couple of times…a lot of times…since then to put some ideas together for something new, but every time, I don’t know, I remember doing that.# _Do I really want to tell you all this?_ Chaandi wondered, remembering the circumstances of their last meeting. On the other hand, if not Jian, who else was there to tell? Nils and the other mangamakers who shared her coolie background, yes, but the conversation would inevitably turn ideological and that wasn’t the problem she felt deepest. #I was incredibly angry,# she went on, #and also incredibly scared--#

#You were? You didn’t act like it.#

#Are you crazy? I was scared sick. Even more before the rallies than afterward. But—oh, I don’t know how to explain it—all the scared and the angry went straight into the design. Energy transfer. You wouldn’t understand.#

#Maybe it’s like piloting,# Jian said slowly, her expression complex, her eyes looking through Chaandi for a moment.

#Maybe so. I don’t know. I just don’t—I can’t get excited about doing just another manga, after that.#

They sat motionless for a moment, until Jian glanced sideways to check the time. #I’ve got a meeting. I should get going…look…you know all I know about manga is how to carry cameras for it, but you could start from the poster and work from there, you know? If I was going to talk to anybody about the whole thing…# Her hands paused in the air.

#Call me later,# Chaandi said finally, looking down again at her painstaking body-art sketches and feeling as if she’d drawn them a year instead of a half hour ago. #I’ll be waiting.#

#...I will.#

 

Lyardin’s new office was on the street of the murals. Its official name was Mashiho Way, but Jian had never actually heard the name used; everyone just called it the street of the murals. They had been painted when her grandparents were children, great swathes of color spreading across walls and roof and even underfoot for the whole five blocks between Lunik Way and Hawkshole Main, incorporating vents and wiring ducts and doorways and light tubing and side alleys into the designs. No one had done much in the way of maintenance since then, and the colors had rubbed grimy, sharp edges fading so that some of the finer details were no longer clear.

“We’ve been talking about a project to repaint them,” Lyardin said, having welcomed Jian to her office (bijou, elegant, with cinnamon-brown fittings in a pale tan space, a live secretary at the desk in front) and asked what she’d like to drink. “Mashiho Elementary is two blocks over, if you’re here for—“ she glanced sideways to bring up the time in her vision—“another hour or so you’ll hear them at recess. And there’s my kid and some of her friends…It’s still under discussion, but it might be nice. Thanks, Van,” she added as the secretary, a slight young man with midworld eyes, served them both with drinks.

Jian sipped her tea—it was jasmine, expensive and delicate, with a real flower unfolding its bright petals on the surface—and wondered if Lyardin was still raising her child at her home in the underworld, solitary and protected by school-mama or school-daddy, and how the underworlders would react with the everyday midworld children, daughters and sons of line foremen and medics and security managers and Persephonet coders, from the local elementary school.

Lyardin was drinking her coffee hot enough to scorch, with every sign of enjoyment. “So you’re looking for a new construct? Imre gave me a general idea of what’s on your mind, and I’ve heard from old colleagues at Kagami that you turned their best efforts down.”

“Haya.” Jian outlined her problem in as few words as possible. “I’m not sure exactly what you can do for me, but Imre was pretty determined,” she added, knowing it sounded ungracious.

“I take it you didn’t think of going into some other profession, one where you wouldn’t have to work so intimately with constructs.” From Lyardin this was a comment rather than a question, and Jian appreciated it.

“My brother recommended it after—afterwards,” she said wryly. “Strongly. But I’m not trained for anything else, and at this age, what would I do?”

Lyardin took the rhetorical question literally. “In jobs that didn’t involve Spelvin constructs? Well, if you were desperate there’s always linework on the surface. You’re not coolie, but so what? You probably know enough engineering to do some lycee teaching, if you were interested. And you’d be a natural for private security, with your size.”

Jian rolled her eyes, and they both chuckled. “It’s an option,” she said dryly. “But I’m not that desperate. Yet.”

Lyardin tossed down the last mouthful of her cooling coffee, made a face, and rummaged in a desk drawer until she came up with a box of almondines. “Have some. If you want to see Imre laugh himself sick, tell him you saw me eating these. You could’ve bought and sold me for these when we were kids…” She bit, and crunched. Jian took one, running a finger over the crystallized sugar on the surface where a coolie sweet would have had sesame seeds. “Tell me something, bi’ Jian—haya, Reverdy. What if Manfred had been the real thing? And, you know, not completely fucking insane. Would you want to work with it? Him?”

Jian was still wondering if the other woman had been this blunt in the boardrooms at Kagami when Lyardin shook her head and rephrased herself. “No, forget Manfred. I mean, with an AI, a real one, no ugly backstory.”

“Too late,” Jian answered, without needing to think. “We’ve already got the ugly backstory—I don’t mean Manfred, either, I’m talking about Dreampeace before Manfred, and the coolies—all those people who’ve been waiting for their rights a lot longer than any newborn AI, the ones who didn’t make it into the news except as those _ulu_ rioters, you know?” Deliberately she used the pejorative, watching to see if Lyardin would react. “If AI ever does come along, it’s coming with baggage.”

“Fair enough.” Lyardin ate her third cookie, and sighed, and fussed with the mother-of-pearl pins holding her hair off her face. “But hypothetically?”

“If you asked Imre that…” Jian said slowly, seeing one reason for Vaughn’s self-described mix of yanqui accent and coolie politics. “He’d tell you no before you’d finished asking the question. He’s proud of his skill. He’d hate to feel as if the AI was doing the real work.” She wondered momentarily what Red’s answer would be. With his fractionally skewed reactions, the technician might almost have been a construct, an AI, himself at times. No. She thought of John Desembaa’s hand running across the distorted model of Red’s face, and the long scars marking Juel Avelin’s jaw, and Red’s slim fingers lying close against Vaughn’s cheek.

Lyardin was waiting; for Jian’s own response, she realized. She shook herself out of the unnerving reverie. “Me, I’m not so sure. I think it would be…oh…This is really hard to explain to anyone who’s not a pilot, yeh? When you’re on-line, piloting, it can be really hard to draw the lines between you and the construct, you and the ship—the better the construct is, the harder it gets. It’s very physical, very intimate—I sign to the ship, I don’t punch in a bunch of numbers. Pilots have a lot of jokes about fucking the ship, but that’s probably the best way to imagine it, if you’ve never done it.” A memory of a memory flashed across her mind, surprisingly strong— _Chaandi’s bare shoulder against her cheek, the weight of a breast against her palm_ —and she blinked it away. “With a construct, the idea is to forget it’s a machine. If it really weren’t one—“

Lyardin’s plain face was suddenly bright with interest. “You _sign_ to the ship? I didn’t know that. Is that common among pilots?”

Jian shrugged, feeling as if she’d unwittingly told a secret. “Well, most yanquis can’t do it. Imre doesn’t. Other midworlders do, I guess, and coolies—there are coolie pilots, you know,” defensively.

“Yes, of course,” but Lyardin’s tone made it clear that her mind was elsewhere. “I wonder if the algorithms…if you took that into account from the beginning…” She shook her head, making the hair pins chime, and refocused on Jian. “Tell me, Reverdy. You really don’t want to leave piloting, do you? Even with all Manfred put you through?”

“I really don’t,” Jian said slowly, knowing she’d as good as answered the question already. “I worked damn hard to get where I am,” she added, supplementing the emotion with hard facts, “and I’m damn good at it—and Imre and Red and I make a good team.”

Lyardin grinned and shook her head. “If you had told me when we were fifteen, sixteen years old that people would be putting their lives—and their cargoes—in Imre Vaughn’s hands…”

“He’s a good pilot,” Jian said, hearing the defensive pride in her voice.

“Oh, I believe it. Both of you would be so much spacedust right now if you weren’t, after what you told me about the trip back from Refuge.”

The phrasing brought to mind Vaughn’s original complaint, and she winced. “So…”

“Right. A construct you can work with. I can do that. So could your friend Libra—so could any competent constructor with a decent base configuration to work from, as long as he wasn’t off-his-head raving crazy. If all you need is a guarantee that your construct has the regulated Three Laws programming and a set of sane and sensible personality templates, I’m your woman.”

“That would be a start,” Jian said.

“That’s all I can do for you, though. I can get you a construct that isn’t AI and isn’t going to be. I can’t keep AI from happening eventually. Venya Mitexi wasn’t completely wrong, you know. Spelvin constructs are probably the last step on the way there.”

“Is that why you left Kagami?” Jian asked.

 Lyardin shrugged. “A little of this, that, and the other. Kagami has a lot to learn.”

“Don’t we all,” Jian muttered. She thought again of the request Chaandi had passed on from the Dreampeace—or ex-Dreampeace—mangamaker Bethel. _Maybe I should tell him whatever it is he wants to know. But only if Chaandi agrees to make her own manga too,_ she thought suddenly, suppressing a grin.

“Keep in touch,” Lyardin was saying, giving her a jolt; but the constructor only meant she’d let her know about delivery and costs—“well discounted, of course. I’d offer it to you free, but I’m a small-business owner now.”

“No problem,” Jian said. She thanked the other woman—Lyardin was obviously itching to get to work already—and left the office.

There was the elementary school Lyardin had mentioned; a vendor’s cart was outside the gates— _good business sense_ —and Jian bought herself a praline, nibbling the sweet as she walked back toward Lunik Way. She should find the nearest connection kiosk and check in with Peace at the coop, talk to Vaughn…call Chaandi. She let herself imagine, briefly, the grudging, fond welcome back into Chaandi's flat and her bed-- _although maybe right now she's in full mangamaking mode, would just look up and sign oh, hi, Reverdy, there's juice in the coolbox, I've got to keep working on this conte--_ and smiled.

 _We’re still using the tools we have_ , she thought. _Constructs, manga…piloting._ _I’m still a pilot, no matter what construct—or even AI—I fly with._ _All we have is our skills, and that's a lot._ Jon Bethel might make something of that if she told it to him, maybe, and Chaandi something else again. What would those strange few days sound like, told in an ex-Dreampeace yanqui accent? What would they refract into through the prism of Chaandi's coolie anger and fear and pride?  _"I hope you have a nice adventure."_  

The faded brilliance of the street of the murals wrapped around her like her virtual world, Jian went on toward the inevitable future.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for a fascinating prompt. Some of the ideas here were inspired by the sequel, _Dreaming Metal_ , but you don't need to have read the sequel, and there are no particular spoilers in the fic. I hope you enjoy it.


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